I'm wondering if I'm wasting my time or if I would be able to actually recover a usable amount. If I'm likely to free 50K, I won't bother. If it might free 5MB, I'll give it a shot.

I don't believe you would save gigabytes of space, possibly not even one. Traffic in the misc@ archives will say the same.

Culturally, the project severely frowns upon kernel squeezing & customization (covered in Section 5.6 of the FAQ...) to the point that the developers will not even talk to anyone filing problem reports using custom kernels.

Unless you are intimately knowledgeable about kernel internals is this worth the effort. Personally, I wouldn't bother. It goes too far against the project's recommendations, & I have found that the project's dictates are well grounded.

I don't believe you would save gigabytes of space, possibly not even one.

Definitely true, since the VPS only has 128MB of memory :-)

I wasn't talking about building a custom kernel, just using config to change GENERIC.

Quote:

Originally Posted by ocicat

Unless you are intimately knowledgeable about kernel internals is this worth the effort. Personally, I wouldn't bother. It goes too far against the project's recommendations, & I have found that the project's dictates are well grounded.

No, I'm not an expert. Your advice is well spoken. It looks to me like the kernel takes 12MB:

Code:

real mem = 133742592 (127MB)
avail mem = 121569280 (115MB)

Not sure how much it could actually shrink by, so it may not be worth the effort.

Using config(8) to disable drivers will save no RAM whatsoever; they are statically linked within the monolithic kernel.

And FWIW, I attempted to get OpenBSD 4.8 or 4.9 (can't recall) running on a machine with 20MB ram with a GENERIC modified kernel config. I got down to about 6MB but that was cutting out all of the USB / BT / anything relevant in the last 10 years of computer hardware.

In the end it worked but I had some issues with PCMCIA cards that I think may have been related to my 'choices'.